Donald Trump does NOT like it when he hears that someone important thinks poorly of him. But it happens so often that his reactions change under different circumstances.
For example, if he hears a prominent Democrat doesn’t think much of him, all he has to do is rely on his base to back him up as he calls them names. He’ll pull out weight, sex, age, race, anything. He trashes anyone who’s not off-limits.
Guess who IS off-limits, though. The Queen of England.
So his tactic has to shift subtly. Of, it’s still underhanded, don’t get me wrong. He just lies. Especially if the person in question isn’t around to dispute what he’s said. And I don’t mean that he lies the way he lied about going down in a helicopter with Willie Brown, or lies about his golf score, or lies about the time of day, just to stay in practice.
I mean the “I heard it from a friend” kind of lies.
The unending stream of faux pas behavior from Trump while he visited the Queen during his presidency was pretty well documented. The suit he wore was ridiculous. He constantly interrupted. He walked right around and in front of her while she showed him the Palace Guard. Heck, he was even warned about that one.
Now, in an upcoming book from the Queen’s official biographer Craig Brown, Elizabeth’s beliefs about the “many controversial leaders” she hosted during her reign, including Trump. He notes that she thought “The Donald” was rude, and that he “must have an arrangement” with Melania that keeps her married to him.
That’s not an unreasonable assumption. Trump IS rude constantly, and prides himself on it. And apart from some kind of potential brain trauma, nobody can quite figure out why Mel stays with a man whose hand she regularly slaps away.
Trump, however, somehow thinks he can just deny it all. In fact, many Trump supporters believe that Trump simply denying something is proof that it didn’t happen. But it’s hard to imagine that someone as private and proper as Queen Elizabeth would lie to the historian who would write the account of her life.
Trump spoke exclusively to Britain’s Daily Mail, the printed version of England’s Fox News-style journalism.
“It was totally false. I have no idea who the writer is, but it was really just the opposite,” he said. “I had a great relationship with the queen. She liked me and I liked her. I spoke to her often, and I spoke to her in particular when I was there.”
That last statement flies in the face of the biographer’s account, which says that Elizabeth was annoyed by Trump constantly looking past her, over her shoulder, “as if in search of someone more interesting.”
Then Trump rolled out the big guns: Employ the “I heard it from someone” strategy, and then impugn the writer.
“She said it to friends of mine that ‘President Trump was my favorite president.’ And then you have this guy looking for some publicity for a book that probably is phony, and a lot of other ways too. Now I know nothing about him. I have no idea who he is.”
It’s pretty obvious that Trump is on the defensive. He can’t have anyone thinking that someone he admired didn’t admire him back. He is notoriously obsessed with bloodlines, and thus royal families. He particularly admires the British royal family due to a love passed down by his Scottish mother.
It must be a hard pill to swallow. So Trump just spit it out.
